News
Growing Inventory of Black Holes Offers a Radical Probe of the Cosmos
When the first black hole collision was detected in 2015, it was a watershed moment in the history of astronomy. With...
‘Unicorn’ Discovery Points to a New Population of Black Holes
Almost a decade ago, Feryal Özel and her colleagues noticed something odd. While a variety of possible black holes had been found in...
Faucher-Giguère Named Highly Cited Researcher for Second Year
Associate Professor Claude-André Faucher-Giguère was included in the Space Science category of the Highly Cited Researchers 2020 List by Clarivate Analytics....
Planets to appear nearly aligned creating ‘Christmas star’ last widely visible 800 years ago
When something inordinately rare or unexpected happens, it is said “the planets aligned.” On Dec. 21, the winter solstice, two planets...
NASA’s Hubble Sees Unexplained Brightness from Colossal Explosion
Neutron-Star Collision Releases Puzzling Burst of Infrared Light Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays...
Using Gravitational Waves to Approximate Pi
Image Credit: Igor Sokalski Getty Images At least 3,700 years ago, Babylonian mathematicians approximated the ratio of a circle’s circumference to...
NASA Einstein Postdoc Kate Alexander Named to Crain’s “20 in Their Twenties”
CIERA researcher Kate Alexander is featured in Crain’s “20 in Their Twenties” for 2020. She earned a doctorate in astronomy and...
Astronomers Find First-Ever Collision of Black Holes With a Strange Mass Discrepancy
Just over a year ago, on 12 April 2019, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration made a detection of gravitational waves, rippling out...
A Supernova that Outshines All Others
A supernova at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded has been identified...
CIERA’s Sasha Tchekhovskoy to Utilize the Fastest Academic Supercomputer in the World
The Texas Advanced Computing Center announced that the National Science Foundation has approved allocations of supercomputing time on Frontera to 49...